Real Results

Portent Helps RealTruck.com Increase Organic Traffic 67% and Revenue by 40% in First Six Months

Background

RealTruck came to us because they were seeing a general slowdown in their organic traffic. Since they have a large site with a million+ pages, including huge numbers of highly similar products, they were extremely worried about duplicate content harming their performance and ranking.

Objective 1: Increase Organic Traffic
Objective 2: Increase Organic Revenue

Strategy & target audience

Portent’s strategy involves a holistic approach to SEO. This meant technical & on-site SEO, as well as improving RealTruck’s site content, and its value to all visitors. That meant increasing the amount of truly unique content on the site, extremely careful SEO of highly similar content within the site itself, and increasing visibility and utility of high-value category or content hubs deeper in the site. This covered: Technical SEO, Strategic Content Production, and Copy Editing of product pages. This quickly expanded to Offsite SEO.

On-site SEO: Our initial strategy was to do a deep review and to triage technical issues with the site itself, with an emphasis on duplicate content. The client’s business strategy requires that they carry every major after-market product or accessory for nearly every make, model, and year of truck on the road, creating an enormous number of highly similar pages.

Content: We helped them launch a new content-production effort that provided real value and entertainment to their core audience. Before we began, the blog was entirely comprised of new-hire updates and other company culture tidbits, and was attracting nearly no attention or back-links. We also wanted to differentiate RealTruck’s product descriptions, to prevent high-authority competitors using the same boilerplate language from hiding RealTruck’s pages in search results altogether.

Offsite SEO: Our strategy shifted to include Offsite SEO when we quickly discovered that they were in fact under manual penalty, for an entirely different issue related to several thousand bad back-links built up by a previous SEO vendor.

RealTruck’s target audience is largely comprised of truck lovers and hobbyists. These are often DIY enthusiasts that are truly passionate about their trucks, and are often fierce brand loyalists.

Implementation & creativity

Technical or On-site SEO: After reviewing the site, we found out that RealTruck had hundreds of thousands of pages that were being blocked from the search engines. They did this based on poor advice from a previous SEO vendor.

We educated the client about the differences in duplicate or highly similar content that is allowed for specifically with e-commerce sites like theirs. We carefully made test portions of their site available for crawl and monitored the results to ensure no duplicate content was reported. Once this approach proved successful, we rolled it out to the remaining huge portion of their site that had been “no-indexed”.

Content: Based on our Content & SEO Strategy, we created a huge number of content topics that would be valuable to RealTruck’s customers and prospects, which they produced with a team of in-house writers. We focused on keeping their quirky sense of humor and brand values front and center on the blog. Which had been primarily used to feature new hires or other company culture, not entirely compelling to the audience. We also identified and rewrote a large number of high value product pages using default descriptions that were duplicated on other sites.

Offsite SEO: We identified thousands of bad links pointed at the site by previous vendors which caused the Google penalty. We worked with the RealTruck team to get these links removed and we were able to get the penalty revoked.

Results & evaluation

Increase of Organic Traffic from our SEO Campaign

All-told, this campaign led to a million+ additional pages being indexed over the course of 6 months. In the first 6 months we increased their organic visits by 67%, brought over a million additional people to the site, and increased revenue by over a million dollars per year. Smashing any expectations the client had about what was attainable for their original target KPI’s. Within six months of engaging Portent, RealTruck had achieved a 94% growth in organic traffic year over year and a 48% increase in organic revenue.

RealTruck.com was named 20th Fastest-Growing Company & 14th Fastest-Growing E-commerce Site Nationwide by Internet Retailer